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These Lovers, then, lovers of the beauty outside of sense,
must be made to declare themselves.
What do you feel in presence of the grace you discern in actions,
in manners, in sound morality, in all the works and fruits of
virtue, in the beauty of souls? When you see that you yourselves
are beautiful within, what do you feel? What is this Dionysiac
exultation that thrills through your being, this straining
upwards of all your Soul, this longing to break away from the
body and live sunken within the veritable self?
These are no other than the emotions of Souls under the spell of
love.
But what is it that awakens all this passion? No shape, no
colour, no grandeur of mass: all is for a Soul, something whose
beauty rests upon no colour, for the moral wisdom the Soul
enshrines and all the other hueless splendour of the virtues. It
is that you find in yourself, or admire in another, loftiness of
spirit; righteousness of life; disciplined purity; courage of the
majestic face; gravity; modesty that goes fearless and tranquil
and passionless; and, shining down upon all, the light of
god-like Intellection.
All these noble qualities are to be reverenced and loved, no
doubt, but what entitles them to be called beautiful?
They exist: they manifest themselves to us: anyone that sees them
must admit that they have reality of Being; and is not
Real-Being, really beautiful?
But we have not yet shown by what property in them they have
wrought the Soul to loveliness: what is this grace, this
splendour as of Light, resting upon all the virtues?
Let us take the contrary, the ugliness of the Soul, and set that
against its beauty: to understand, at once, what this ugliness is
and how it comes to appear in the Soul will certainly open our
way before us.
Let us then suppose an ugly Soul, dissolute, unrighteous: teeming
with all the lusts; torn by internal discord; beset by the fears
of its cowardice and the envies of its pettiness; thinking, in
the little thought it has, only of the perish able and the base;
perverse in all its the friend of unclean pleasures; living the
life of abandonment to bodily sensation and delighting in its
deformity.
What must we think but that all this shame is something that has
gathered about the Soul, some foreign bane outraging it, soiling
it, so that, encumbered with all manner of turpitude, it has no
longer a clean activity or a clean sensation, but commands only a
life smouldering dully under the crust of evil; that, sunk in
manifold death, it no longer sees what a Soul should see, may no
longer rest in its own being, dragged ever as it is towards the
outer, the lower, the dark?
An unclean thing, I dare to say; flickering hither and thither at
the call of objects of sense, deeply infected with the taint of
body, occupied always in Matter, and absorbing Matter into
itself; in its commerce with the Ignoble it has trafficked away
for an alien nature its own essential Idea.
If a man has been immersed in filth or daubed with mud his native
comeliness disappears and all that is seen is the foul stuff
besmearing him: his ugly condition is due to alien matter that
has encrusted him, and if he is to win back his grace it must be
his business to scour and purify himself and make himself what he
was.
So, we may justly say, a Soul becomes ugly- by something foisted
upon it, by sinking itself into the alien, by a fall, a descent
into body, into Matter. The dishonour of the Soul is in its
ceasing to be clean and apart. Gold is degraded when it is mixed
with earthy particles; if these be worked out, the gold is left
and is beautiful, isolated from all that is foreign, gold with
gold alone. And so the Soul; let it be but cleared of the desires
that come by its too intimate converse with the body, emancipated
from all the passions, purged of all that embodiment has thrust
upon it, withdrawn, a solitary, to itself again- in that moment
the ugliness that came only from the alien is stripped away.
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